The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism held an unusually consequential hearing on August 4 entitled “Your Data, Their Profit: The Consumer Cost of AI Surveillance Pricing.”
The hearing produced something that has become increasingly rare in Washington: substantial bipartisan agreement that Congress should do something about the use of consumers’ personal data to set individualized prices.
The hearing was chaired by Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), with Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) serving as ranking member. The five witnesses were Lindsay Owens, President and CEO of Groundwork Collaborative; Robert Hedges, Digital Fellow at MIT and former Chief Data Officer of Visa; Lee Hepner, Senior Legal Counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project; Hillary Caron, Policy Counsel at the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union; and Z. John Zhang, Professor of Marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. (The written testimony of each witness is linked to each of his or her name above.)
Four of the five witnesses were highly critical of surveillance pricing and advocated new legal restrictions. Zhang was the important outlier, cautioning that personalized pricing can sometimes benefit consumers, particularly price-sensitive consumers, and that Congress should not outlaw legitimate dynamic pricing.
But the most significant development may have occurred on the dais rather than at the witness table.
Senators from both parties expressed serious concern about surveillance pricing. Most strikingly, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal said that he and Republican Senator Josh Hawley already have “a framework for legislation” and declared: “We need a law. We need a federal law. We need federal standards. We need national safeguards.”
Hawley subsequently said that the Federal Trade Commission should use its existing authority to address surveillance pricing and that consumers need legal rights against the practice. (Although criticized by then Commissioner and now FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, in January of 2025 the FTC published staff research summaries from a surveillance pricing study that was then underway.)
Hawley also indicated after the hearing that he expects to introduce his own legislation.
That suggests that federal legislation may have a considerably better chance of becoming bipartisan than the current legislative record would otherwise indicate.